TechEd Developer in Europe

I got a chance to attend and speak at TechEd Developer this year in Barcelona. The TechEd developer event is happening this week followed by the TechEd IT Forum next week.

Last night I went to a local restaurant “MOO” with some colleagues. It was one of the best restaurants that I have been to in a long time. I was thinking about why I felt that way and realized it was both a combination of some excellent food and the presentation of the same. It got me thinking about something that I have been saying for a while now – we really need developers and designers to work together to deliver the next generation application and web experiences to deliver the best experience for the customers – similar to how you need the chef + the ambiance to come together and deliver a great dining experience for the customer.

I got a chance to announce some exciting things today. Here is a quick summary:

·The product team at Microsoft is putting the finishing touches on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 as we speak now. We are on track to shipping these products before the end of November 2007. We will have the marketing launch for these along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 at the end of February.

·We have a very broad partner ecosystem with Visual Studio. Some of our partners have needs to target multiple platforms. As a response to our partners’ request, we are going to remove license restrictions with Visual Studio and the Visual Studio SDK to enable you to use the Visual Studio IDE and build applications that target the platform of your choice.

·For our premier VSIP customers, we are going to provide access to the Visual Studio source code to enable you to better design and debug your add-ins to Visual Studio.

·Popfly Explorer which is an add-in to Visual Studio. This enables you to easily add a Silverlight gadget that you built using Popfly to your Web page and to easily publish your Web page to Popfly. In essence this makes it very easy for you to make your Web site look that much cooler.

·CTP for the Microsoft Sync Framework that enables you to build on the offline synchronization capability in Visual Studio 2008 and deliver great peer-to-peer and offline synchronization capabilities that let you sync-enable your application. This in turns enables data (irrespective of the protocol or the data type or the data store) to follow your customer no matter where they are and no matter what device they use.

·Software + Services Blueprints that contain a framework with source code access, guidance and tools that work with Visual Studio to enable you to easily build software + services solutions. We delivered the first in a series of such blueprints that enables you to build an add-in to Outlook 2007 that exposes data and interacts with external services.

I had fun both talking about these things and showing some of these products and technologies in action here at TechEd.

I am really glad to see the RTM date is still set for the end of the month, but it still begs the question as to why there have been no "fresh" public CTPs or RC drops since July’s beta 2 release?

We have already made a fairly significant investment in .Net 3.5 for a product we are hoping to ship in January 2008. It would be extremely nice to know if there are going to be any substantial breaking changes between B2 and the RTM bits (especially in the WCF/WPF stacks).

@Craig – To your question on removing licensing restrictions, the restrictions we are moving are designed to enable developers who are building custom developer tools with the VS SDK to target other platforms beyond Windows. This announcement is not related to Visual Studio Express which does not support 3rd party add-ins.

What a great news!! I look forward to this release. I have been using beta 2 in VPC, and get excited of LINQ feature.

Will Team Foundation Server 2008 be released to MSDN subscriber at the end of this November too? Our company plans to use TFS since some time ago, but because there is no integration supported to WSS 3.0, we postpone it until now. If the TFS 2008 is released, we will surely implemented as soon as possible :).

Will TFS 2008 support for VS2005 (Team Explorer 2005)? Some of our current developments will be moved to use new TFS, instead of VSS 2005 that we are currently using.

I attended your talk at TechEd, but must admit that I am not impressed by the direction Visual Studio is taking with 2008 and Rosario. In my opinion there is way too much focus on ALM and enterprisey stuff, when there are still many of the basic things that aren’t working properly.

WYSIWYG was a big thing for word processors in the past, but VS still does not do this properly for web applications. Web controls render somewhat like they will look in a browser, but not perfectly so. User controls have improved, but often fail to render in nested master pages. Templated user controls do not render in pages at all (grey box syndrome). This really should be addressed before anything else.

When designing user controls, they only render correctly if links to stylesheets are added to the markup, but this causes lots of invalid link tags to be emitted when the controls are used in pages. Design-time attachment of style sheets ought to be a feature.

The rules for code formatting are insufficient for complete control of how the code should look.

There are many things one could add to the current refactoring options. Also, these is to my knowledge no facility for applying common design patterns (e.g. in the class designer).

These are just examples of the basic day-to-day functionality that imho will affect many more developers and add much more value than the suggested features for Rosario.

Regarding the release timeframe for TFS 2008, we fully intend to release TFS on the same day as the rest of the Visual Studio 2008 product line.

Regarding the question of Team Explorer compatibility, we have worked hard to make sure that TE 2005 is compatible with TFS 2008 and that TE 2008 is compatible with TFS 2005 so that the migration process of servers and clients can happen independently of one another.

I’m sorry, but the keynote delivered was too shallow, and was presented with little heart by both presenters (Somasegar and co.). The primary part of the keynote used analogies to wedding day shopping add-ins for Microsoft Outlook that were completely out of this world and others that few could relate to.

A highlight was two grafitti artists painting live to the elegant wall of tech-house music presented by a DJ live on stage. I’d like to kudos the TechEd team for deciding on this highlight – it was a very nice start to an otherwise boring keynote littered with buzzwords and artificial conversation between the speakers.

Aside from that, the TechEd event is becoming more of a product showcase and tends to focus on high level architectural overviews instead of "going deep" sessions on great API design, patterns in software (with real work examples) and so on – stuff that relate to the problems the developers are facing on a day to day basis.

We were looking for hardcore SharePoint developers on the Ask the Exports booth area; we’re facing some problems with large scale deployments and was unable to find – or be directed to – staff that could participate in a meaningful discussion on the topics.

Great to see people like Ron Jacobs on site – the should put him on the keynote instead.

S. Somasegar, Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, announced on his blog, that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 will be released at the end of this month. The official marketing launch, which will include Windows…

Soma, just a quick note on your keynote speech. I found it a good keynote, but must tell you that even though you speak English very well, your pronunciation of the English language is terrible. Added to that you also spoke very quickly. I found it very hard to understand what you were saying. And I wasn’t the only one who was bothered by this. Everyone that was sitting near me complained about this! I don’t want to bash you, but maybe you should do something about it.

We are starting a new 6 month project with about 10 developers and we are still not sure whether to go for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 or wait for Visual Studio 2008 RTM. The problem is that we need to prepare the dev workstations next week as we start developing the 26th November. I don’t want an exact release date but can we expect the golden bits by the end of this week of in the middle of next week?

The news of the impending RTM is good, but there are a few lingering (and one showstopper) bugs for us in SQLCE 3.5. The big one is that subqueries don’t work in Beta 2. I’ve read that they are supposed to be fixed in RTM, but it’s getting difficult to explain to customers why we can’t tell them when we can get bits out to them.

I know that DevDiv has no obligation in this area but it’s frustrating. Vague time frames are fine when something is months out, but it gets hard as the release window looms closer.

please don’t push too much. I think it is very good to get our handy early on beta releases to see how the product evolves. This is good for Microsoft and for us. But if you start to develop software which depends on beta builds and then want to put pressure on influencing the release time I could understand thar Microsoft might want to rethink how early in the developing cycle they could give us their bits. Come on, you are a developer, you should know how easy it is to find bugs which either force you to delay shipping or ship known bugs. I prefer the delay over known bugs. I think we all remember the crying about VS2005 shipping too early and waiting for SP1.

Nevertheless, I also cannot await to download RTM 😉 This is going to be a cool version.

I am the Program Manager for SQL Server Compact 3.5. Can you please provide the sub-query that is not working in SQL Server Compact 3.5. My email address firstname.lastname_at_microsoft_dot_com. The firstname and lastname is the placeholder.

I’m finishing my article for magazine about the conference and I need some official photos (from your keynote also). There are no photos on official conference site from developers conference (present only from IT Forum).

Can you (or someone else) help me with high quality professional-made photos? Maybe you can point to some link, etc.

I check in partner download, and check that TFS 2008 is only for trial version, the other is Workgroup Edition, which is not suitable for us. Previous version, we have full version of TFS 2005. Will partner receive full version of TFS 2008? Is it ok for us to install the trial version first?